Should Children Have a Voice in Custodial Placement?

The aim of this paper is to bring to attention the custodial placement of children with divorced parents. Essentially, this paper looks at the importance of involving the child in the process of deciding on a parenting schedule. This is done by examining how children are personally affected by this decision and arguments made to not involve children. Upon examination of these ideas, it becomes clear that during a divorce case children should be given the opportunity to share their opinion on the parenting schedule

The primary cilium encourages osteogenic behavior in periosteal osteochondroprogenitors and osteocytes during juvenile skeletal development and adult bone adaptation

Primary cilia are sensory organelles that facilitate early skeletal development, as well as maintenance and adaptation of bone later in life. These solitary, immotile organelles are known to be involved in cell differentiation, proliferation, and mechanotransduction, a process by which cells sense and covert external physical stimuli into intracellular biochemical signals. Bone is a metabolically active tissue that continuously recruits osteogenic precursors and relies on osteocytes, the sensory cells of bone, to coordinate skeletal maintenance. Overall bone quality is dependent on the integrity of the initial structure formed, as well as this organ’s ability to adapt to physical loads. Proper differentiation and controlled proliferation of osteogenic progenitors are critical to the initial formation of the skeleton, while osteocyte mechanotransduction is essential for adaptation of developed bone. These phenomena rely on primary cilia, but little is known about the origin of osteogenic precursors and the ciliary mechanisms that promote osteogenesis. In this thesis, we first characterize an osteochondroprogenitor (OCP) population that rapidly and extensively populates skeletal tissues during juvenile skeletal development (Chapter 2). We also demonstrate that the primary cilium is critical for these cells to differentiate and contribute to skeletogenesis. We then show this OCP population is required for adult bone adaptation and is mechanoresponsive (Chapter 3). Again, we demonstrate that primary cilia are necessary for these OCPs to sense physical stimuli and differentiate into active bone-forming cells. Finally, we identify a novel link between ciliary calcium and cAMP dynamics in the osteocyte primary cilium (Chapter 4). Specifically, we show that a calcium channel (TRPV4) and adenylyl cyclases, which produce cAMP, bind calcium to mediate calcium entry and cAMP production, respectively, and these phenomena are critical to fluid flow-induced osteogenesis. Collectively, our results demonstrate that an easily extracted progenitor population is pre-programmed towards an osteogenic fate and extensively contributes to bone generation through primary cilium-mediated mechanisms at multiple stages of life. Furthermore, we identified ciliary proteins that are potentially unique to the osteocyte and can be manipulated to encourage osteogenesis by tuning calcium/ cAMP dynamics. For these reasons, we propose that this OCP population and their primary cilia, as well as osteocyte ciliary proteins that coordinate calcium/ cAMP dynamics, are attractive therapeutic targets to encourage bone regeneration

Fast Fashion and Its Impact on the Environment

The fashion industry is influential all around the world. Fashion is a way that people can express themselves, be creative, and connect with people. Many people also rely on fashion to make a living, whether it be working in a retail store, a corporate office, or a factory. Everyone across the supply chain is affected by fashion, from cotton farmers to everyday shoppers. In an industry full of positives, it can be difficult to spot flaws at the surface level. Like most industries, fashion is a business, focused primarily on making money. While this is good for corporations, it is extremely harmful to the environment and underpaid workers. The fast fashion business model, though profitable and easy for corporations, is very harmful to the world by negatively affecting the environment and many people’s quality of life

The Impact of Contextual Political Factors on Personnel, Rulemaking, and Partisanship

The context in which an institution operates structures the way political actors respond to it. Broadly, this dissertation explores these contextual variables. The first chapter provides an overview of the arguments I will make in the dissertation and the results I find. The second chapter considers political context as it relates to excepted political appointees. I argue that presidents utilize Schedule C appointees more frequently in ideologically proximate agencies and when ideological conflict in the Senate is high. I show some evidence for these arguments using an original OPM dataset on Schedule C appointees from 1998 through 2013. The third chapter shifts to a discussion of public participation on federal rulemaking activity. Looking at an original dataset of all regulations on regulations.gov from 2004-2016, I show preliminary evidence that several contextual political factors impact the number of comments agencies receive on their rules. Agency expertise requirements and rules with legal deadlines are negatively correlated with comments while congressional attention on the producing agency and more significant rules tend to receive greater public attention. In the fourth chapter, John Patty and I consider the presidential appointment decision. We present a theory of bureaucratic staffing which allows staffers to affect agency policy priorities. To our knowledge, it is the first paper to consider the impact of structural characteristics like agency productivity and policy breadth on the appointment decision. The fifth chapter, coauthored with Jon Rogowski, examines the relationship between partisanship and voting behavior in the antebellum Congress. We show that the effect of partisanship varied over time in conjunction with institutional changes. Partisanship was stronger in the House than the Senate and the relationship exhibited three distinct periods. The sixth chapter provides an overview of an original dataset of all final rules produced by agencies from 2000 through 2014. These data are unique in that previous studies utilize the Unified Agenda, an incomplete data source. I overview the purpose of these data, describe the variables, and show a number of interesting descriptive statistics

The Value of Waste: The Cycle of Products and Byproducts in Nepal’s Eastern Hills

The purpose of this thesis will be to explore conceptions of waste in Nepal’s rural village of Simigaau to understand what constitutes waste and in what ways it is critical to the community’s physical and cultural survival. Due to the contribution of many aspects of daily life in the creation of “waste” in Simigaau –what it is and what it means – I hope to use a whole systems approach to understand the multitude of factors that affect how villagers view waste and whether its value can provide insight into a local way of life. Moreover, I aim to explore whether a community’s waste – seen and unseen – provide insight into a local way of life and if so, how this insight may be applied to both Nepal at large and connotations of “waste” in the West

The Ideas of Milton’s Areopagitica in Contemporary Society

Milton fought against editors who sought to change his work and the work of others before it was published. The ideas conveyed in the Areopagitica are reflected in contemporary copyright laws and the concept of self-publishing. Specifically, the idea of self-publishing would have appealed to Milton so he could publish his works without constraint. Although he advocated for the people to write despite certain risks, such as censorship, Milton sought to inspire people to change the way society thought, not to display their sometimes ill opinions. The contemporary mediums of social media allow people to post these opinions without restraint, but the risk remains as nothing is private once it is on the internet

Beyond Black and White: Visualizing Cultural Identity Amidst Racial Anxiety and Nativism in American Modernist Novels

Walter Benn Michaels’ Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism highlights that the search for identity is a mutual project of both nativism and Modernism and reveals how relevant racial identity is in American Modernism. While this is an important relationship in American Modernism, I argue that many recent studies following Michaels’ legacy of scholarship on race and nativism in modern American literature reduce individual authors’ projects, too often interpreting them all to have similar anxieties and desires for American racial identity and citing the presence of racial tropes as evidence of the authors’ own social and political arguments. Michaels set a precedent of overlooking the aesthetic in critical examinations of racial identity in American modernist texts, but I argue that aesthetic spaces are often the spaces where authors work through issues of race and identity and that aesthetics are crucial to understanding identity formation in many American modernist novels. Modernism is a movement that explores the idea that identity is not one-dimensional or whole, and I wish to illustrate a more kaleidoscopic view of racial aesthetics in American Modernism, exploring the complexity and variations of race presented by a variety of authors. Various American authors come to both Modernism and race in different ways and have unique projects and perspectives about racial identity. I wish to broaden the scope of conversation surrounding American Modernism and race, and I hope to illuminate the significance of examining the various and unique aesthetic elements at play in individual works of modern American fiction. I will examine works by Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nella Larsen to argue that race and Modernism have a more complicated relationship than much scholarship acknowledges and that the nativist and racial language and themes presented by many American modernist writers can be read more richly according to the various narrative perspectives and projects of the writers using them